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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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Born on July 16, 1955, Susan Wheeler grew up in Minnesota and New England. She is the author of several books of poetry and the novel Record Palace (Graywolf, 2005).

Her first collection, Bag 'o' Diamonds (University of Georgia Press, 1993), was chosen by James Tate to receive the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Her other collections are Smokes (Four Way Books, 1998), Source Codes (Salt, 2001), Ledger (Iowa, 2005), and Assorted Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), which includes poems from her first four books, and Meme (University of Iowa Press, 2012),

Her poems have appeared in eight editions of the The Best American Poetry series, as well as The Paris Review, New American Writing, Talisman, The New Yorker and many other journals.

About her work, John Ashbery writes: "Susan Wheeler's narrative glamour finds occasions in unlikely places: hardware stores, Herodotus, Hollywood Squares, Flemish paintings, green stamps, and echoes of archaic and cyber speech. What at first seems cacophonous comes in the end to seem invested with a mournful dignity."

Wheeler's awards include the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Wheeler has taught at the University of Iowa, NYU, Rutgers, and Columbia University, and is currently on the creative writing faculty at Princeton University. She has lived in the New York area for twenty years.

Meeting Again, After Heine

Susan Wheeler, 1955

The moon rose like a blooming flower.
The tin in the hand clattered its charge.
We walked by in the wavering hour,
I looking away, you chattering hard.
Met by luck, with like destinations,
We startled again at what ended in pique.
Strollers out, seeing us, had no notion;
A car alarm cycled its querulous shriek;
Eighth Street sank in the crack of its nightfall;
You pressed your satisfactions on me.
You in your urgency remarked after all
Kindling your passion was enmity;
Passion had finally erased your calm,
Made composure a prop of the past.
I mugged that street noise, din, bedlam,
Prevented my hearing your story at last.
As I walked home the strollers were thinning,
The moon bobbed above roofs like a ball,
The shade at the bus stop waved to me, beckoning,
And I nodded fast in the fast nightfall.

Susan Wheeler

by this poet

qui s'est refugie
ton futur en moi
—Stéphane Mallarme, "A Tomb for Anatole"
Small bundle of bones, small bundle of fingers, of plumpness, of heart,
predicate, prescient, standing and wobblings, lit up in the joy,
lachrymose GA, your bundle oh KA, the unfolding begun of the start,
of the toys, of

Red barn, still house, shimmering heat.
Brown barn, air in rain, green smell.
I climbed the hill to volunteer my hands:
O works that we may walk in.
The rodent's toe in the pinecone cell,
the brackish bag with its damp wax gel,
beside the fence links, glinting.
One was spending one hundred thirteen

Green is the false nettle
and green is its bloom
and few are the tenders
you pull from your room,
fewest are the cinders
that fall from your fire,
the many times I wait at
the sparking of desire,
and full yearned, unsated
you adopt a green regret,
unfaithed a slopping kettle
you in my love, beset.